SOCIAL NETWORKS IN 20th CENTURY CHINESE ART

Professor Julia Andrews

AUTUMN 2017

Class # 33943

HISTORY OF ART 8811

This graduate seminar will look at some

of the networks of relationships among

twentieth century Chinese artists and

beyond China’s borders that have re-

sulted in significant artistic movements

or events. Our preliminary readings will

include samplings from recent historical,

literary, art historical and social science

writings that take a similar approach.

For their final projects students are en-

couraged to follow their own interests,

which may include cross-cultural or in-

ternational linkages among artists, joint

exhibitions, collegial links that may take

place in art societies, colleges, and else-

where, to name only a few possibilities.

What impact did such connections have

on artistic practice and self-positioning?

WEDNESDAYS 2:15-5:00

BECOMING PICTURE: MIMESIS, CAMOUFLAGE,

AND THE ARTS OF INVISIBILITYProfessor Kris Paulsen

This course will survey the best of world cinema within the past decade or two, includ-ing representative examples of national cinemas, such as (potentially, since the selections would change) Iranian, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian; ethnic cinemas, such as (potential-ly) Kurdish, Jewish diaspora, and Quebecois; regional cinemas, such as (potentially) East-ern European and Middle Eastern cinemas; continental cinemas, such as African and South American; global cinema, such as Euro-American, Hong Kong, and Dogme 95; and the cinemas of civilizations, such as Islamic, Judeo-Christian, and Confucian. Not all these cat-egories, or others that are possible, are represented in any given quarter.

HISTORY OF ART 8901

AUTUMN 2016

Call # 23681WEDS & FRI 2:20-3:40

This course will explore major developments in Chinese art from 1850 to the present, with particular interest in how artists defined themselves in the context of radical social and economic changes, periods of destructive warfare, and an increasingly international art world.

This course introduces students to the major media and techniques used by artists in Asia. We will examine in-depth the practical aspects of the production of sculptures, paintings, prints, drawings, mandalas, and other media. This emphasis on technique will be balanced by discussions of the ways that a work’s materiality shapes and activates its meaning.

This course takes a long historical look at the tactics of camouflage, mimesis, and mimicry in

philosophy and aesthetics, as well as natural, military, and activist contexts. The trajectory of

the seminar will be to move these historical discussions into our contemporary biopolitical and

neoliberal moment to think about how we might actively resist the structures of power in the

age of mass surveillance, self-tracking, and endless quantification. We will look to artists and

activists – across periods and movements, form the ancient to the contemporary – to theorize

what it means to become invisible and to understand the power of disappearance. Thinkers

we will address in the seminar include Franz Fanon, Roger Caillois, Jacques Lacan, Maurice

Meleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hanna Rose Shell, Michel Foucault, Zach Blas, Eyal Weizman,

Hito Steyerl, and Wendy Chun among others.

AUTUMN 2017

Class # 33956WEDNESDAYS 2:15-5:00